I knew that hormones dictate mood and there are a bunch of built-in schedules that our bodies keep in order to “survive”. What I recently learned, though, was that the thing that “wakes you up in the morning” isn’t the first cup of coffee of the day or a nice little bit of sunlight coming in through the windowshades, but a cortisol spike.
Which is not great.
How I found out
So, like, technically, I can sleep until 9AM and still wake up, journal, have coffee, and clock into work on time. Shoutout to remote work!
But what I’ve noticed is that I’ll “naturally” wake up at around 7 and immediatelly start feeling anxious about the work day ahead. Just an endless barage of anxious thoughts about all the tasks that are due soon, all the difficult conversations I might have to have during the day, all the possible (bad) surprises that might come out of left-field that I’ll have to deal with.
It’s terrible.
And once that engine starts running — I can’t shut it down.
So I just struggle to fall back asleep for another two hours and then end up getting out of bed at my usual time, but more exhausted than when I was going to bed the night before.
So I was like, “what gives?” and started researching.
And that’s how I found out about the morning cortisol spike thing.
The Internet is Full of Unhelpful Advice
The first psychiatrist I ever went to when I wanted an official anxiety/depression diagnosis asked me if I have “negative thoughts”.
Uh, yeah, dude, of course. That’s why I’m here!
You know what his advice was?
“Just don’t think about it!”
That’ll be $50, thank you very much.
And most of the information that I find online about avoiding this cortisol-induced anxiety is just “try to lie down and relax and not think about the things that are stressing you out.”
Which, like, obviously that’s the right thing to do. If I can train my brain to not be anxious first thing in the morning my life will be 100x better right away. But that’s not helpful advice, though, is it?
So, uhm… yeah… This was another episode of “learning about the underlying reasons for why I feel like shit without finding any useful and actionable steps I can take to deal with it.”
I’ll be sure to add that to the list of “if you have ADHD you should try time-blocking” and “if you struggle to cook healthy meals for yourself you should prep healthy meals for yourself ahead of time.”
Cheers.